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Why, yes, I hate the Universe. Ask me why. Go ahead, ask.
My project for the early afternoon was trying to get "Strowler's Song" recorded adequately well for The Elmsley Count, a task I figured wouldn't be too difficult as I'd already decided to forego the production bells and whistles and stick with a single acoustic guitar track and the lead vocals. I spent an hour or so mucking about with the mic, Garage Band, my guitar and my own vocal chords, trying to find some way to make the bastard work the way it does when I perform it live, and failing. I finally gave up on recording guitar and vocals separately, forgot about piecing together a good performance from fragments, and went for the direct approach: setting the mic in front of me, hitting "record," and just performing the song straight up in one uninterrupted take. And after much more cussing and a dozen false starts and a lot of soul-searching to find that magic to make it come together, I got the perfect take—strong, passionate, not flawless but better because of its flaws, and carrying all the weight of a really good live performance. And with some knob twitching, I even got it to sound exactly how I wanted in terms of reverb and balance and all that. This was it.
I made a mistake, though, in that I chopped the recording off a wee bit too close to the last note; I'd gotten the whole performance on disc, but it needed a little more room at the end to breathe. So I went in to record an extra two seconds of silence, with maybe a bit or room noise to make it sound like part of the performance.
Garage Band, apparently, couldn't handle this, pitched a fit, and crashed.
It was the one and only time in this whole CD project that I had neglected to save. That perfect performance was, and is, gone.
I didn't cry, but I came close. *sigh* I'm more philosophical about it now—I did it once, I can do it again, and at least I now know how—but Jesus H. Yog Sothoth on a surfboard, that's not faaaiiiirrrrr.... (On the other hand, after six or seven years I finally get to use the Don Music icon.)
My project for the early afternoon was trying to get "Strowler's Song" recorded adequately well for The Elmsley Count, a task I figured wouldn't be too difficult as I'd already decided to forego the production bells and whistles and stick with a single acoustic guitar track and the lead vocals. I spent an hour or so mucking about with the mic, Garage Band, my guitar and my own vocal chords, trying to find some way to make the bastard work the way it does when I perform it live, and failing. I finally gave up on recording guitar and vocals separately, forgot about piecing together a good performance from fragments, and went for the direct approach: setting the mic in front of me, hitting "record," and just performing the song straight up in one uninterrupted take. And after much more cussing and a dozen false starts and a lot of soul-searching to find that magic to make it come together, I got the perfect take—strong, passionate, not flawless but better because of its flaws, and carrying all the weight of a really good live performance. And with some knob twitching, I even got it to sound exactly how I wanted in terms of reverb and balance and all that. This was it.
I made a mistake, though, in that I chopped the recording off a wee bit too close to the last note; I'd gotten the whole performance on disc, but it needed a little more room at the end to breathe. So I went in to record an extra two seconds of silence, with maybe a bit or room noise to make it sound like part of the performance.
Garage Band, apparently, couldn't handle this, pitched a fit, and crashed.
It was the one and only time in this whole CD project that I had neglected to save. That perfect performance was, and is, gone.
I didn't cry, but I came close. *sigh* I'm more philosophical about it now—I did it once, I can do it again, and at least I now know how—but Jesus H. Yog Sothoth on a surfboard, that's not faaaiiiirrrrr.... (On the other hand, after six or seven years I finally get to use the Don Music icon.)
